WABA's longest running regular meet was once again held on the second Saturday of the month. Regular WABA members and new attendees alike came together for another great day of boardgaming. On a personal note, I was very glad to see someone I previously told about WABA attending for the first time and appearing to enjoy himself.

WABA's guild can be found here.The metalist of WABA games played can be found here.

I managed to get there early and after setting up, Grug had arrived. We decided to play a quick 2 player game before others arrived at the scheduled 1.00pm start and I agreed to play this dice game. While I had played Zooloretto before, I had only played the dice game online. Grug easily beat me, with some unhelpful rolls not helping my cause.

While I think the tactile feel of rolling dice live is much better than doing so online, I still think this game is missing something to push it into a game worth me regularly playing.

Richard wanted to play one of his newest games, and so Richard, Blake, Grug, WABA newcomer Lewis, WABA newcomer Adam and I ventured to spend a night in the village to hunt out the werewolf/werewolves, fully knowing that there may be up to 2 werewolves amongst the minion, robber, troublemaker and other asssorted characters.

Many people have played Werewolf/Mafia and this is a similar concept condensed into one night. This means that the role that you start the game with and potentially use the power of during the night may not be the role you wake up with! This presents a whole new aspect and layer of accusations, rebuttals and counter-accusations.

Grug left us and the 5 remaining players played it again.

Both times, we played with the free app that moderates the game for the players, saving the need for a human moderator, whether external or one of the players. I can't remember who won both games, but I really enjoyed this and don't mind playing this again.

I first played this card drafting game a few days before and Richard was keen to play it again. In this game, players draft and play cards of thugs, holdings/buildings and actions in order to make the most money.

Eric ran away with the win on 110 175, over Richad Richard and Adam each on 110, me on 95 and Lewis on 85.

Eric taught this hidden team game to Mark, Richard, Lewis, Adam, Robin Shaw and me. We are all crewmembers on a plane. The pilot has been killed by evil infiltrating crewmembers who all know who each other are, and the good crewmembers must all get into the cockpit to successfully control the plane. If even 1 evil infiltrating crewmember gets in there, all evil infiltrating crewmembers win.

Each player has three loyalty cards, one each of good and bad loyalty and the third randomly given to determine final loyalty (whatever majority loyalty one has, they are that loyalty). There are various phases where one person can look at one loyalty card of someone else and put a marker to declare whether that card shows good or evil loyalty. There are also various voting phases to get people into the cockpit based on whether the table trusts or doesn’t trust that person.

Having three loyalty cards means that even if someone sees one good or evil loyalty cards, it cannot conclusively prove loyalty. This means that the information is as much about who says they saw what on each card, who is voting to trust or not trust which player, and the discussion/argument that occurs in this social deduction game.

With 7 players, there were 4 good and 3 evil crewmembers, with all 4 good crewmembers. In both games the evil players won, the first game when I was the last crewmember voted in, the second when I was the first player voted in (actually, the vote between me and the other player (Lewis?) was redundant as we were both evil).

It was only after both games ended that Eric reread the rules and found a crucial rule that he had missed and had consequently made the game much harder for the good guys. Instead of starting with a blank slate of information, we were all meant to look at the closet card of each neighbour and place a marker to declare what was seen. This allows for some information/claimed information on which to start the game, and would make it a bit more fairly balanced compared to the unintentional no-information variant we were playing.

Reading through the rules posted online on BGG, it seems that there were a few other rules we missed too. Despite this, I enjoyed it and look forward to playing it with more/all of the rules correct.

Richard taught Robin Shaw, Flayne and I this 2006 Kinderspiel des Jahres Winner, which saw us using a set of hand held bellows to puff air so our ships (or a pirate ship) moved across the board to harbours to get coins (or if blowing the pirate ship, to steal from other players).

This was a light, somewhat silly but generally enjoyable game that was a worthy Kinderspiel des Jahres Winner. Flayne took out the win over (in order) my, Richard and Robin Shaw.

Tim's now popular game again hit the table, with several different game types being played throughout the meet (first one to make it fall causes everyone else to win, 1v1, 1v1v1v1, 2v2 order of taking A1 A2 B1 B2, A1 B1 A2 B2 and possibly more).

I personally played in 3 games and I know there were at least 3 more games played just when I was there. It wouldn't surprise me if it were played more during the night - can anyone confirm?

I taught Adam and Lewis this classic deckbuilding game. As Magic players, they picked up the concepts really quickly In a 4 player game with Richard playing the pure basic setup, Richard showed them the power of chaining actions through markets and villages, while I explained and showed the idea of remodelling provinces into provinces to try end the game quicker. I won, over Richard and then Lewis 1 point over Adam.

Eric joined us and we played another game rather than 5 player Dominion (which I may have declined to play anyway), so Adam and Lewis didn't get to play with any of the expansion cards (although I did show some to demonstrate some of the different things that could be done).

Thanks to Jason for letting us use his 'I have all the cards, sleeved and with the special alternate art' massive and heavy Dominion box.

After the above mentioned fillers (Zooloretto Dice and One Night Ultimate Werewolf), once Jacob finally dragged his sorry butt through the door, we embarked on A Study of Emerald.

We were joined by Blake and Jason (my first time playing with both) all of whom were new to this game. This was only my second play, but that made a world of difference in terms of learning/teaching the game. Much smoother run this time, even though, since it's such a kitchen sink game, it's kind of challenging to teach. In fact, unless everyone wants to study the rulebook ahead of time, I'd say it's best to not teach all of the possible contingencies (such as the vampires and the zombies, who will only come out in some games).

Having said that, the vampires card appeared pretty early in this play, and Blake really tried to grab it, but was blocked by pretty much everyone at the table. Despite his bluffing, we figured out early on that Blake was a loyalist. And then, when he attempted to assassinate me, everyone discovered that I was on Blake's team.

I had figured out that Jason was also on our team when he bumped up the war track, and probably should have kept it to myself in retrospect, but thought we'd have more of a team ganging up on Jacob situation, but Blake wanted the win at any cost and turned on his team mates (Hey, there can only be one winner, right?). This allowed Jacob to assassinate a lot of royalty, giving him points that he couldn't possibly lose.

In the end, our team had the lowest scoring player, so we were eliminated and Jacob was therefore the winner.

I absolutely love playing this game. It's not a prefect information strategy game or anything, but it's incredible fun.

Blake and Jason left and Jacob and I joined Ian and (birthday girl) Tegan for this game based on chemistry.

It was everyone's first play, and the rule book seemed less than ideal, but it was still fairly easy to get going. You research (draw elements out of a bag and trade with your neighbours), study the compounds you want to mix and then put out the elements. There's lots of different areas you can raise your stats in to allow you to research more, study more, etc.

In the end, it reminds me of a more complicated Splendor. In a good way I think. The game started to feel a little long by the end, but I'm fairly sure that was due to us all being new to the game (and having to refer to the rule book a little too often) but I definitely liked the game and would like to play some more.

This play ended a little anticlimactically when Ian caused the end game trigger and then we just all packed up the game before we realized, wait, there is an end game scoring.

Anyway, Ian and Jacob were a point apart in the lead, and I'm fairly sure it would have still gone to Ian, but I also know some of us (me) could have scored more points had we realized.

The same group followed up with a play of this lesser-known game. It's not gonna make many people's top ten list, but I think it's well designed fun game. Anyway, I was really happy to be getting it back to the table.

Players are walking around the Mediterranean, building columns and collecting bonuses. You make sacrifices to the gods for their favours. etc etc.

In some ways it feels like a train game - You lay routes (with these great wooden feet) and collecting sacrifices is like buying shares (though they are fairly generic, since you never have to have a specific type of sacrifices, just a specific number of them).

Ian and Jacob both built up better engines than Tegan and I and were quite a ways out in front, but Ian took it by a pretty large margin in the end (lapping me on the score track).

Not sure if it's a coincidence or not, but the two players right out in front both were first player twice, the two players in back were only once. )Have only played the game with two players previously where everyone is first player the same amount of times).

We also had one ridiculous epoch that was over after only the first player's turn!

Anyway, I like the game and would like to see it on the table some more.

No, you didn't see me at the meeting on Saturday (self-imposed quarantine, so I don't catch any nasty bugs), but I just thought I'd record here that I have been playing SmallWorld once a week. Not over the board, but using the app (SmallWorld 2). Up to five of us play using the Android, iOS or PC version, from Perth, Canberra, and Vienna. The app has many advantages compared with playing over the board. Much faster to set up and put away, not messy fiddling with counters during play, and more accurate scoring. The app allows for typed comments during play, so you still have the opportunity for gamesmanship - an essential part of any gaming experience. The main downer is that getting started can be a bit messy - which we have overcome to a degree by Skyping or Facebooking (or phoning) just to find out what is going on.

Overall, I'm mightily impressed by the app. And if I feel like a quick game at some arbitrary time, I can just play the computer, which beats me frequently (so is no slouch).

Best of all, when I play over the Net, I don't risk catching any nasty bugs!